In a pair of cases being argued today, the U.S. Supreme Court reviews the federal government’s power to detain migrants. This pair of cases, Johnson v. Arteaga-Martinez and Garland v. Aleman Gonzalez, raise similar legal issues: Can federal immigration officials detain a person indefinitely without the possibility of requesting release from an immigration judge when a person who is not a U.S. citizen has already been detained for at least 6 months and is waiting for immigration officials to decide whether they will be allowed to remain in the United States? In each case, a circuit court [...]
Troubled contractor gets $180 million to hold young migrants
Biden administration officials last month moved $180 million from one troubled contractor to another to ensure that it can keep using two South Texas facilities in which migrant youth are regularly detained. An official notice published in the Federal Register on November 30 indicates that $178,007,159 originally slated to go to Comprehensive Health Services, Inc. will now be paid to Southwest Key Programs, Incorporated. The federal government’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, runs a network of facilities in which young migrants [...]
Chronicling Arizona’s Immigration Politics
Like the California of the 1990s, Arizona is where immigration politics have clashed most fiercely in the last decade or so. In their new book Driving While Brown: Sheriff Joe Arpaio Versus the Latino Resistance, journalists Terry Greene Sterling and Jude Joffe-Block dive deeply into the changing politics of Arizona, examining Joe Arpaio’s rise to prominence and the intensity of efforts to defeat him at the ballot box. In a conversation with me, the authors will discuss the changing politics of migration in Arizona and their efforts to cover a story full of big personalities and impactful [...]
Tracking ICE Surveillance
In less than two decades of existence, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has developed a sophisticated network of digital surveillance practices that relies heavily on partners in private industry and local government. On Tuesday, November 9, Tracking ICE Surveillance brings together two advocates at the forefront of efforts to understand ICE’s use of surveillance technologies for a conversation about modern immigration policing practices: Jacinta Gonzalez, Senior Campaign Organizer at Mijente, and Nina Wang, a Policy Associate with the Center on Privacy and Technology at [...]
Private prison can’t pay $1/day, jury says
A federal jury in Washington sided with detainees and the state attorney general yesterday in a lawsuit claiming that private prison corporation GEO Group violated state minimum wage laws by paying detainees $1 per day to cook and clean at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington. The verdict in two cases, Nwauzor v. The GEO Group, No. 3:17-cv-05769 (W.D. Washington September 26, 2017) and State of Washington v. GEO, No. 3:17-cv-05806 (WD Wash. October 9, 2017), now returns to the jury for it to determine the damages GEO Group owes the former detainees who are part of the [...]
Tort Law Comes to Immigration Advocacy
As legislative attempts to alter immigration law have failed time and again, policies under the influence of executive branch agencies have become critical features of the immigration law landscape. Along with that, litigation has challenged officials’ efforts to mold immigration policies to reflect the political priorities of the administration occupying the White House. Advocates frequently turn to constitutional claims or the strictures of congressional enactments. But a few creative lawyers are turning to much older legal doctrines to advocate on behalf of migrants. In Tort Law Comes [...]
Blocking Haitians, limiting asylum
The disturbing images of Border Patrol agents on horseback attempting to block migrants from entering the United States, widely shared in September, tap a long history of heavy-handed U.S. immigration law enforcement policies. In a public lecture I delivered for the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, a research center at Ohio State University, I described similarities in the decades-long approach toward Haitian migrants in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and in recent months. Even when U.S. asylum law clearly requires physical presence in the territorial United States to request [...]
ICE updates enforcement priorities
A few months later than promised, the Department of Homeland Security today updated guidelines its agents are to use when deciding whether initiate immigration enforcement actions. In a memo signed by Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, DHS commits to a comprehensive review of individual migrants to gauge whether they “pose a threat to national security, public safety, and border security and thus threaten America’s well-being.” Adopting three categories of threat, the department’s newest enforcement priorities repeat longstanding criteria. Despite that similarity with past [...]